Equities

Causality between investor sentiment and the shares return on the Moroccan and Tunisian financial markets ArXiv ID: 2305.16632 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper aims to test the relationship between investor sentiment and the profitability of stocks listed on two emergent financial markets, the Moroccan and Tunisian ones. Two indirect measures of investor sentiment are used, SENT and ARMS. These sentiment indicators show that there is an important relationship between the stocks returns and investor sentiment. Indeed, the results of modeling investor sentiment by past observations show that sentiment has weak memory; on the other hand, series of changes in sentiment have significant memory. The results of the Granger causality test between stock return and investor sentiment show us that profitability causes investor sentiment and not the other way around for the two financial markets studied.Thanks to four autoregressive relationships estimated between investor sentiment, change in sentiment, stock return and change in stock return, we find firstly that the returns predict the changes in sentiments which confirms with our hypothesis and secondly, the variation in profitability negatively affects investor sentiment.We conclude that whatever sentiment measure is used there is a positive and significant relationship between investor sentiment and profitability, but sentiment cannot be predicted from our various variables. ...

Green portfolio optimization: A scenario analysis and stress testing based novel approach for sustainable investing in the paradigm Indian markets ArXiv ID: 2305.16712 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In this article, we present a novel approach for the construction of an environment-friendly green portfolio using the ESG ratings, and application of the modern portfolio theory to present what we call as the ``green efficient frontier’’ (wherein the environmental score is included as a third dimension to the traditional mean-variance framework). Based on the prevailing action levels and policies, as well as additional market information, scenario analyses and stress testing are conducted to anticipate the future performance of the green portfolio in varying circumstances. The performance of the green portfolio is evaluated against the market returns in order to highlight the importance of sustainable investing and recognizing climate risk as a significant risk factor in financial analysis. ...

E2EAI: End-to-End Deep Learning Framework for Active Investing ArXiv ID: 2305.16364 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Active investing aims to construct a portfolio of assets that are believed to be relatively profitable in the markets, with one popular method being to construct a portfolio via factor-based strategies. In recent years, there have been increasing efforts to apply deep learning to pursue “deep factors’’ with more active returns or promising pipelines for asset trends prediction. However, the question of how to construct an active investment portfolio via an end-to-end deep learning framework (E2E) is still open and rarely addressed in existing works. In this paper, we are the first to propose an E2E that covers almost the entire process of factor investing through factor selection, factor combination, stock selection, and portfolio construction. Extensive experiments on real stock market data demonstrate the effectiveness of our end-to-end deep leaning framework in active investing. ...

Generating Synergistic Formulaic Alpha Collections via Reinforcement Learning ArXiv ID: 2306.12964 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In the field of quantitative trading, it is common practice to transform raw historical stock data into indicative signals for the market trend. Such signals are called alpha factors. Alphas in formula forms are more interpretable and thus favored by practitioners concerned with risk. In practice, a set of formulaic alphas is often used together for better modeling precision, so we need to find synergistic formulaic alpha sets that work well together. However, most traditional alpha generators mine alphas one by one separately, overlooking the fact that the alphas would be combined later. In this paper, we propose a new alpha-mining framework that prioritizes mining a synergistic set of alphas, i.e., it directly uses the performance of the downstream combination model to optimize the alpha generator. Our framework also leverages the strong exploratory capabilities of reinforcement learning~(RL) to better explore the vast search space of formulaic alphas. The contribution to the combination models’ performance is assigned to be the return used in the RL process, driving the alpha generator to find better alphas that improve upon the current set. Experimental evaluations on real-world stock market data demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our framework for stock trend forecasting. The investment simulation results show that our framework is able to achieve higher returns compared to previous approaches. ...

Market Making with Deep Reinforcement Learning from Limit Order Books ArXiv ID: 2305.15821 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Market making (MM) is an important research topic in quantitative finance, the agent needs to continuously optimize ask and bid quotes to provide liquidity and make profits. The limit order book (LOB) contains information on all active limit orders, which is an essential basis for decision-making. The modeling of evolving, high-dimensional and low signal-to-noise ratio LOB data is a critical challenge. Traditional MM strategy relied on strong assumptions such as price process, order arrival process, etc. Previous reinforcement learning (RL) works handcrafted market features, which is insufficient to represent the market. This paper proposes a RL agent for market making with LOB data. We leverage a neural network with convolutional filters and attention mechanism (Attn-LOB) for feature extraction from LOB. We design a new continuous action space and a hybrid reward function for the MM task. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on latency and interpretability, showing that our agent has good applicability. ...

The Quadratic Local Variance Gamma Model: an arbitrage-free interpolation of class C3 for option prices ArXiv ID: 2305.13791 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper generalizes the local variance gamma model of Carr and Nadtochiy, to a piecewise quadratic local variance function. The formulation encompasses the piecewise linear Bachelier and piecewise linear Black local variance gamma models. The quadratic local variance function results in an arbitrage-free interpolation of class C3. The increased smoothness over the piecewise-constant and piecewise-linear representation allows to reduce the number of knots when interpolating raw market quotes, thus providing an interesting alternative to regularization while reducing the computational cost. ...

A Simulation Package in VBA to Support Finance Students for Constructing Optimal Portfolios ArXiv ID: 2305.12826 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper introduces a software component created in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) that can be applied for creating an optimal portfolio using two different methods. The first method is the seminal approach of Markowitz that is based on finding budget shares via the minimization of the variance of the underlying portfolio. The second method is developed by El-Khatib and Hatemi-J, which combines risk and return directly in the optimization problem and yields budget shares that lead to maximizing the risk adjusted return of the portfolio. This approach is consistent with the expectation of rational investors since these investors consider both risk and return as the fundamental basis for selection of the investment assets. Our package offers another advantage that is usually neglected in the literature, which is the number of assets that should be included in the portfolio. The common practice is to assume that the number of assets is given exogenously when the portfolio is constructed. However, the current software component constructs all possible combinations and thus the investor can figure out empirically which portfolio is the best one among all portfolios considered. The software is consumer friendly via a graphical user interface. An application is also provided to demonstrate how the software can be used using real-time series data for several assets. ...

Deformation of Marchenko-Pastur distribution for the correlated time series ArXiv ID: 2305.12632 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract We study the eigenvalue of the Wishart matrix, which is created from a time series with temporal correlation. When there is no correlation, the eigenvalue distribution of the Wishart matrix is known as the Marchenko-Pastur distribution (MPD) in the double scaling limit. When there is temporal correlation, the eigenvalue distribution converges to the deformed MPD which has a longer tail and higher peak than the MPD. Here we discuss the moments of distribution and convergence to the deformed MPD for the Gaussian process with a temporal correlation. We show that the second moment increases as the temporal correlation increases. When the temporal correlation is the power decay, we observe a phenomenon such as a phase transition. When $γ>1/2$ which is the power index of the temporal correlation, the second moment of the distribution is finite and the largest eigenvalue is finite. On the other hand, when $γ\leq 1/2$, the second moment is infinite and the largest eigenvalue is infinite. Using finite scaling analysis, we estimate the critical exponent of the phase transition. ...

Stock and market index prediction using Informer network ArXiv ID: 2305.14382 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Applications of deep learning in financial market prediction has attracted huge attention from investors and researchers. In particular, intra-day prediction at the minute scale, the dramatically fluctuating volume and stock prices within short time periods have posed a great challenge for the convergence of networks result. Informer is a more novel network, improved on Transformer with smaller computational complexity, longer prediction length and global time stamp features. We have designed three experiments to compare Informer with the commonly used networks LSTM, Transformer and BERT on 1-minute and 5-minute frequencies for four different stocks/ market indices. The prediction results are measured by three evaluation criteria: MAE, RMSE and MAPE. Informer has obtained best performance among all the networks on every dataset. Network without the global time stamp mechanism has significantly lower prediction effect compared to the complete Informer; it is evident that this mechanism grants the time series to the characteristics and substantially improves the prediction accuracy of the networks. Finally, transfer learning capability experiment is conducted, Informer also achieves a good performance. Informer has good robustness and improved performance in market prediction, which can be exactly adapted to real trading. ...

Predicting Stock Market Time-Series Data using CNN-LSTM Neural Network Model ArXiv ID: 2305.14378 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Stock market is often important as it represents the ownership claims on businesses. Without sufficient stocks, a company cannot perform well in finance. Predicting a stock market performance of a company is nearly hard because every time the prices of a company stock keeps changing and not constant. So, its complex to determine the stock data. But if the previous performance of a company in stock market is known, then we can track the data and provide predictions to stockholders in order to wisely take decisions on handling the stocks to a company. To handle this, many machine learning models have been invented but they didn’t succeed due to many reasons like absence of advanced libraries, inaccuracy of model when made to train with real time data and much more. So, to track the patterns and the features of data, a CNN-LSTM Neural Network can be made. Recently, CNN is now used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) based applications, so by identifying the features from stock data and converting them into tensors, we can obtain the features and then send it to LSTM neural network to find the patterns and thereby predicting the stock market for given period of time. The accuracy of the CNN-LSTM NN model is found to be high even when allowed to train on real-time stock market data. This paper describes about the features of the custom CNN-LSTM model, experiments we made with the model (like training with stock market datasets, performance comparison with other models) and the end product we obtained at final stage. ...